PHILIP SIDNEY (1554-1586).  Sidney, the ideal gentleman, the Sir Calidore of Spenser’s “Legend of Courtesy,” is vastly more interesting as a man than as a writer, and the student is recommended to read his biography rather than his books.  His life expresses, better than any single literary work, the two ideals of the age,—­personal honor and national greatness.

As a writer he is known by three principal works, all published after his death, showing how little importance he attached to his own writing, even while he was encouraging Spenser.  The Arcadia is a pastoral romance, interspersed with eclogues, in which shepherds and shepherdesses sing of the delights of rural life.  Though the work was taken up idly as a summer’s pastime, it became immensely popular and was imitated by a hundred poets.  The Apologie for Poetrie (1595), generally called the Defense of Poesie, appeared in answer to a pamphlet by Stephen Gosson called The School of Abuse (1579), in which the poetry of the age and its unbridled pleasure were denounced with Puritan thoroughness and conviction.  The Apologie is one of the first critical essays in English; and though its style now seems labored and unnatural,—­the pernicious result of Euphues and his school,—­it is still one of the best expressions of the place and meaning of poetry in any language. Astrophel and Stella is a collection of songs and sonnets addressed to Lady Penelope Devereux, to whom Sidney had once been betrothed.  They abound in exquisite lines and passages, containing more poetic feeling and expression than the songs of any other minor writer of the age.

GEORGE CHAPMAN (1559?-1634).  Chapman spent his long, quiet life among the dramatists, and wrote chiefly for the stage.  His plays, which were for the most part merely poems in dialogue, fell far below the high dramatic standard of his time and are now almost unread.  His most famous work is the metrical translation of the Iliad (1611) and of the Odyssey (1614).  Chapman’s Homer, though lacking the simplicity and dignity of the original, has a force and rapidity of movement which makes it superior in many respects to Pope’s more familiar translation.  Chapman is remembered also as the finisher of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, in which, apart from the drama, the Renaissance movement is seen at perhaps its highest point in English poetry.  Out of scores of long poems of the period, Hero and Leander and the Faery Queen are the only two which are even slightly known to modern readers.